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Zoom - I don't want to go into too much detail (just because I seem to be explaining it a lot at the moment), but basically the FUNCTION of the barbelith moderator is to facilitate conversation, sort out bugs, alert people to really bad behaviour and generally make their forum a nicer place to hang around in.
Quite a lot of this is just about taking a special interest in your forum and trying to make it an interesting and on-topic place to hang out. If conversation dries up it's up to you to find something WORTH talking about - if a thread looks like it's running out of steam without having really gotten to grips with its issue, you should be looking to how you can get it back on track.
Moderators do not point fingers publically in the forum that they're in charge of unless they HAVE to. Speak to people through private messaging if there's a problem and talk to other moderators and me via PM as well if you want some advice.
THE ACTUAL PROCESS OF MODERATION is a rather different beast. Basically, everyone has by their name 'moderate post' and 'moderate user' when they're logged in. Moderators see that by EVERYONE'S name in their forum. So they can go in and suggest an edit to the post, a deletion of the post, a moving of the topic, a deleting of the topic and some (as yet undefined) actions regarding people. Each one of these actions requires a certain amount of positive votes to be completed and only ONE negative vote to not happen. Moderators in a forum where a change has been suggested get asked for their vote - and when enough have voted on a change then it's either carried out or NOT carried out - depending on the circumstances.
There are two particularly neat things about this system. The first is that we can weight different actions according to their consequences. It takes THREE VOTES from people (as well as the initial suggester) for a thread to be deleted. And it only takes one vote for most of the lesser actions.
The second thing about it is that since it requires less votes than each forum should have moderators - moderations can be acted on quickly - and if you come to the site after amoderation has been completed then you won't be informed about it. You only see the things that people want to do there and then... So even if you only log onto the site once a month for a couple of hours and only vote on two or three moderation actions then you're still HELPING, even if we'd rather you did it more than that... |
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